Pages

Friday, 19 September 2014

As the campaign entered its final weeks, particularly after
YouGov gave the yes campaign their single percentage point lead, it all got a
bit unpleasant at times. I removed my “yes” Twibbon from my Twitter profile
after a while as I was so shocked by some of what I saw. On the eve of the poll
I almost wrote a Ewen Morrison-style “why I’m now a no voter” post. There were
three things that I found particularly problematic.

Firstly, was the endless accusations of BBC bias and the
demonstrations outside Pacific Quay. These got to me for a number of reasons.
Most importantly was the basic issue of the BBC is biased. It doesn’t take a genius to work this out. Just try
watching any of their coverage of industrial disputes as a trade union member;
or consider their coverage of the Middle-East from any perspective beyond that
of Israel or the US. I also could not understand why it was an issue for Yes –
if their campaign was so powerful, so grassroots and honest, if the BBC were
not fully reporting how overwhelming it was, why did it matter? Surely Yes was
beyond the BBC? I was also fairly impressed with the BBC coverage overall. It
was atrocious before the start of 2014, but it is the British Broadcasting
Corporation – the vast majority of its viewers were not interested in IndyRef
before then. This is also why the endless questions that had already been
debated in Scotland, kept being re-aired; the rest of the UK had not heard
them. The rest of the UK only woke up when that YouGov poll was published. And
in those final two weeks there was some very impressive coverage – Robert
Peston in particular was very good; the Big Big Debate got massive plaudits
across the political spectrum. Even Nick Robinson moved away from being his
usual right-wing ignoramus to doing some good reporting. On the eve of the
vote, he could have, quite rightly, reported how he was booed out of Perth
Concert Hall, but he didn’t. That wasn’t the news story.

The second thing that made me absolutely livid and frankly
ashamed to be associated with the whole process was that video of someone on a
rickshaw following some Labour MPs, including Ed Milliband through the streets
of Glasgow playing the Imperial War March from Star Wars and saying things like
“welcome imperial masters”. This was followed by people in Darth Vader and
stormtrooper outfits waving Yes flags. This disgusted me. It was utterly
ignorant of Scotland’s major role in the making of the British Empire. Scots
were disproportionately active in the slavery and cold-blooded ruthlessness
that made the British Empire for two centuries. The empire made the wealth of
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. To pretend Scotland is somehow an oppressed
country overpowered by imperial overlords is an insult to this history of
suffering. We have had this debate; we have had this vote; we are not
oppressed.

The final thing that got to me was something I mentioned
briefly in my post about being a swithering Yes voter – the naïve, blind
optimism of those on the political left who supported Yes, with their
unflinching idea that somehow an independent Scotland would become a socialist
utopia. This became only more ludicrous once the English left started to
chip-in. It utterly ignored the facts of the social attitudes of the Scottish
population – a point made all the more apparent to me when I was preparing some
slides for later today. In the 2013 results of the Scottish Social AttitudesSurvey, 75% of compassionate, left-leaning Scots who believe in social justice
agree or strongly agree that the majority of people who claim benefits claim
them fraudulently (a staggering 48% strongly agree); 52% of the same Scots
either think taxes and spending should be lowered (4%) or stay the same as they
are at the moment (48%). Oh, and those free university places that Scotland is
so proud of boasting about because they demonstrate how socially just we are?
72% of Scots disagree with them.

Now, there are two responses to this I can expect. One is
quite ridiculous, but I actually have some time for – all these people are
Daily Mail readers who have had their views polluted by a right-wing press. To
be fair, if you compare the news agenda in countries with more tolerant views
on such things, like our Scandinavian chums, their press reports them less
negatively. But we’ve never been voting whether we’d get a radically different
press ownership with different editorial views. We’ve been voting for
constitutional change.

The other response is, ahh, but Scotland successively elects
left-of-centre representatives in elections. Firstly, you have to agree that
the Labour party is currently left-of-centre, which I doubt many on the Yes
left would do. Secondly, and a much further stretch, you have to count to SNP
as avowedly left-of-centre. They are not. They are a nationalist umbrella of
the right-of-centre and the left-of-centre that find their locus around the
hollow signifier of “Scotland”. Promises to reduce corporation tax and policies
currently that aim to do nothing but deliver “sustainable economic growth”
reflect a party as pro-business and wedded to the neoliberal conventional
wisdom as the Tories. Free university places, free personal care to the
elderly, the council tax freeze etc. have all been at the cost of services to
marginalised people throughout Scotland (just ask all those whose projects
closed down from 2008 onwards). These are regressive policies that win votes
that you can easily dust with some social democratic icing.

This is where I end up agreeing with the Guardian and CarolCraig, who both argued beautifully for a no vote. To claim Scotland is more
left wing is nationalist. You are
saying these people who live in this nation are different to those people who
live in that nation. This is a nationalist argument; you cannot deny that. The
only way out of that logical trap is to point out Scotland is more like the
rest of northern Europe (and thus, actually, quite right-wing) and it’s England
that’s odd because its politics are more aligned with those of north America.
However, this begs the question, why independence? Couldn’t we become another
bit of the Netherlands instead? No. because Scotland is different. It's nationalism is different, it's not nationalist. And this morning I’m witnessing an ugly side of this –
tweets appearing on my timeline from Yes campaigners blaming proud No voters
for damning Scotland and the Scottish to more years of Trident; more years of
poverty. Because this was a nationalist campaign, somehow no voters are not
“Scotland” or “Scottish”. May I remind you again, the majority of Scots would
not wish to see taxes rise to pay for more generous welfare benefits.

As the debate raged and got more heated in the final days
this was a view I came to agree with more and more. I expressed it on Facebook
as I know a lot of my followers were proud No voters. There was absolutely no
way I was going to openly express these views on Twitter. The vilification of
the Guardian piece – a very well-reasoned, social-democratic, liberal argument
for No – on Twitter was a sight to behold. Being “nationalist” was too
difficult a brush to be tarred with. I tentatively mooted some points of
criticism of some of these arguments on
Twitter and did elicit some of the wall of positivity of the Yes campaign, but
I basically censored myself.

For this reason I did agree with Ewen Morrison when he “cameout” as a Yes voter who had switched to “No” because of this relentless
positivity, because there was no argument behind the Yes other than incessant
optimism and a suggestion that you were wrong to even suggest that life in an
independent Scotland might be tough; or it might even be quite right wing? This
wasn’t across the board, and there were a lot of very good discussions, but
there was a palpable sense that debate had been closed down by many in Yes.

And this brings me to my final worry – that Yes was
essentially just an empty signifier. With its relentless optimism – the big
white Yes on a blue background was a design masterstroke – anyone could write
their hopes for the future onto it. I thought of this whenever I stood on a
“Keep the Tories out forever” Yes leaflets on the pavement in Leith, or when I
heard the fallacious “save the NHS vote Yes” argument. In many respects this
was the great strength of the Yes campaign – like Obama’s message of “Hope” (in
what?) it got the grassroots out, and very impressive they were too. I walk
across the Foot-of-the-Walk in Leith every Saturday morning and at the start of
the campaign back in 2012 Yes and Better Together took it in turns each
weekend. Then Better Together stopped around the end of 2013. Then it was Yes
every weekend. The most recent time I saw No Thanks was with ten days to go,
the weekend after that poll. As one No campaigner suggested to me, they felt
like they’d been given up on. Whereas the hollow signifier of Yes could bring
everyone to its cause – an independent Scotland will be a truly wonderful place
because I say so. The wounds of
dented pride are going to be difficult to heal over the next few years and I
hope the UK’s politicians have the skill to do so.

And yet, oddly, the one argument that was never made much
was the one I made in my blog post – the constitutional point. Yes, some on the
left suggested that independence would revive democracy, but with very few
concrete plans of what that new democracy would look like. The draft
constitution impressed me, but there were no firm plans of how a continuing
constitutional convention would operate. There was a real opportunity to invest
resources in a radical participatory democratic programme and cement this in
the ongoing running of the country.

We now have the much bigger, more challenging and arguably
more exciting job of reforming the UK. I found myself agreeing with that
despicable man Nigel Farage this morning as he argued that the whole
constitution of the UK needs looking at again. However, in this process I am
scared of two things. Firstly, that the timetable set out is just too fast. It
will not allow the issues to be properly debated across the UK and it will
leave more tensions within the UK settlement than we have at the moment.
Secondly, I fear the path dependency of the UK. I don’t have much time for path
dependency – as someone with a background in history, I often read it as social
scientists playing bad history. But two areas in this constitutional debate
have all the hallmarks of path dependency – the Barnett Formula and reform of
the Palace of Westminster.

The Barnett formula because it’s about money and any change
to it effects those bits of the UK who have done worst from the current
constitutional settlement. But it needs to go. It enables the centralisation of
power in the hands of the UK treasury. We need a new financial settlement
across the UK where local government in England cannot have its budget cut by
30% at the whim of a Whitehall minister; and where the nations and regions can
shape their futures. The Yes campaigners have to accept this as well. If we had
gone independent the Barnett formula would have been gone once and for all – we
would no longer have benefited from the ways in which it allows money to flow
across the nation counteracting spatial economic differences.

On reform of the broader institutions of Westminster – we
need, and I hope we will get – a coalition of all those enthusiastic Yes and No
voters with those disenchanted in the rest of the UK; with those in the north
of England who feel even more left behind by political events; with those in
the South East who feel aggrieved about the way transfer payments across the
nation operate; with the Welsh and Northern Irish who would have been left
high-and-dry by Scottish independence.

We also have so much to do in Scotland itself. The process
of government has rumbled on here while this debate has been happening and it
demonstrates we need change. The Yes votes in Dundee, Glasgow, North
Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire show how we need to reengage with the
poorest in Scottish society and make their lives better. We need to remove all
local authorities from the straitjacket of the council tax freeze and give them
the power to deliver what their people clearly want. We need to implement the
recommendations of the Commission of Local Democracy. We need to stop living in
a Scotland where Edinburgh Council can no longer afford routine maintenance of
its school estate; where Police Scotland seem immune to democratic scrutiny.
These are big, and small, policy issues we need to get on with debating.

The hope of the empty signifier of Yes was a reaction to
trends we’re seeing across the industrialised democracies of the world: the
rise of global capitalism, where Apple is bigger than some countries' GDP and
nation-states cannot pin down companies to pay their taxes; growing income and
wealth inequality across the globe; the very terrifying threat of climate change
about which we seem unwilling to act; and poverty and social exclusion. This is
manifesting itself in our political institutions: in the growing power of small
elites of career politicians and media moguls in countries (Scotland very much
included); in the declining voter turnout and membership of political parties;
and in the growth of protest parties, from the Tea Party, UKIP, the far-rightin Sweden and the Yes campaign. All of these are empty signifiers, offering to
disenchanted voters “down with this sort of thing” (what?) and “we can change
things” (how?). Constitutional change in Scotland would have given a very small
kick against these global challenges – we might have seen a boost in political
participation that would have lasted beyond the first election. Now we have to
deliver a much bigger kick across the UK and across the international left-wing
movement.

This morning, another sad theme in tweets from Yes
campaigners is, that after all those weeks of saying how great this process of
democratic debate was, they’re now dismissing it out-of-hand since they have
lost the argument, for now. The view is now that is was a victory of “fear” and
“global capitalism”. This saddens me greatly. Democracy has happened; it has
been witnessed in greater numbers in Scotland than for 50 years. People who
have never voted before headed off to the polls. Can we not be vindictive about
the result and just get on and deliver a new UK for everyone?

And if you are a Yes supporter and you’re reading this
spitting tacks, thinking “I’m not a nationalist”, “how dare he tar me with this
brush” don’t bother commenting. I won’t respond as you’re just proving my
argument. Firstly, go to bed, then step back, and then set to work making the
UK better.

Tuesday, 9 September 2014

Well, the above tweet has got 36 RTs at the time I write this, so it gives an impression of what the ferment of the #IndyRef debate on social media is like at the moment. Therefore, I'm not optimistic that a blog post about my recent paper will have much success. But here goes...

Most of my research and writing outputs to date have been on
urban policy and urban regeneration with a distinct interpretive policy
analysis approach (here,
here and here)
with some dabbling in discourse analysis (here
and here)
and most recently in my work on middle class community activism with Prof
Annette Hastings (here, here and here). My most recent paper is dabbling into the world of
urban sociology a bit more, published in Housing
Studies.

In this post I want to shamelessly promote my writing by
producing a synopsis of the paper, but also reflect a bit more on the process
of peer review, as I
am wont to do. The paper comes out of the AHRC Connected Communities
project, led by Prof Chris Speed at Edinburgh Uni that was involved in called
Ladders to the Cloud, along with RCAHMS and community partner organisations in
Wester Hailes. You’ll have probably heard about this project before because of
the totem pole that was partly a result of it.

The paper essentially takes further the analysis and
argument made in blog posts for the social history blog From There to Here, here
and here. If you
look at the comments on the photos on the From There to Here Facebook page, I
argue, you see residents and former residents of Wester Hailes collaboratively
writing stories. There’s two main formats: “Do you remember this?”, “Yes, it
was X in Y”; or “Is that you and X”, “Yes and that’s X we were doing Y”. These
stories add a little more evidence as to how working class people understand
their sense of home and place.

In the first version of the paper I focused on two aspects
of sense of place in particular – firstly, coming out of the coproduced
fieldwork and my research background, was how these stories resisted widespread
stigma to Wester Hailes and reframed the neighbourhood in a positive light.
Secondly, I drew on the concepts of selective and elective belonging to explore
how committed these commenters were to their neighbourhood, or former
neighbourhood.

The very positive, useful and extremely in-depth comments
from the peer reviewers also allowed me to bring in a broader literature on
working class sense of home from Chris Allen among others. This massively
improved the paper, though due to work commitments at the time, it did delay
the process of producing the revisions.

The process of peer review was very good indeed (although a
little bit lengthy, but hey-ho). The original paper focused much more on the
aspects of stigma, but also tried to bring in the broad literature on social
capital, social class and community activism. I sort of knew it wasn’t working,
but thought the paper was ready for peer review. The reviewers comments made me
realise this part of the argument really wasn’t
working and I just dropped it and focused on a much slimmer argument. And luckily, mashing together the chopped
stuff with some stuff from this
paper that was rejected by a journal with some quite
staggeringly bad comments, has left me with another paper ready(ish) to go
to a community development journal.

However, what was most surprising was the paper went from
“Reject and resubmit” to “accepted” following one set of revisions. I was
absolutely gob-smacked. The last time this happened was with my first
ever paper from my MSc dissertation. Anyway, I can’t complain as reading
through the paper to correct my proofs, it isn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Also,
unlike some reviewers (me not included) my reviewers focused on improving the
broad sweep of the argument being made, rather than providing corrections
line-by-line. As a result when I submitted corrections I’d almost run out of my
50 spaces manuscript central would allow me.

Anyway, I hope you do read the paper and enjoy it. To
summarise the argument, it is:

If we look at historic, naturally shared
narratives of working class belonging then they are complex and nuanced with
various degrees of selectiveness to their belonging;

Facebook sites can be a really good source for
“natural” talk about neighbourhoods and belonging;

Facebook is media and the content of it shapes
responses - beware the algorithms.

Wednesday, 3 September 2014

I don't usually put images on this blog (I know I should) but for once I have one to hand that is very appropriate:

Regularly readers of this blog might recall back earlier
this year I was writing about doing my review on the evidence
around social networks and poverty for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (including
this handy
guide to key concepts). Well, it’s finally had the sign-off, so as
requested by the JRF I’ve published it myself here,
with all the “findings” of the reviews collated into one document here
(big PDF).

I’m very glad I got the opportunity to do the review. It
really expanded my knowledge and understanding of what poverty is, particularly
the difficult dividing line between economic inequality and poverty. The
position I now find myself in intellectually is understanding that economic
inequality drives poverty, but the two are distinct concepts.

As I was applying for the review I had a few discussions
about doing research for the JRF with other researchers. One thing that was
emphasised was that the JRF want two things that scholars often find very
difficult to deliver – unequivocal findings and practical recommendations on
what could be done now to make things better. And this is very much the case, I
found out, particularly with these reviews that were designed to feed into a
strategy to tackle poverty in the UK.

One aspect of this was an invite down to the JRF office in
London earlier this year to present my headline findings I five minutes. To
brag about myself shamelessly, I think I did rather well here, managing to get
through them in three minutes. I presented them in “slide-pack”
format: a slide packed with information that you can use as a sort of precis,
available here. I managed to summarise my findings so briefly because there was
so little to talk about, essentially the main finding was, in the short term, if
you want to tackle poverty don’t bother focusing on social networks.

What was extremely reassuring at the JRF event was one of
the panel members wholeheartedly agreed with me and summarised the point better
than I could. Intrinsically you want to think social networks must matter for tackling poverty – it’s
not what you know, but who you know, right? If you know richer people, they’ll
give you money at the most basic, right?

Not really; or there’s no evidence to show that’s the case.
Poverty is most likely to exclude you from social networks due to shame and
financial exclusion. The idea of strong working class communities of poorer
people rallying around to support one-another just doesn’t seem to be supported
by the evidence.

However, one frustration with our review was because it was
one of the smaller reviews and was very tightly circumscribed we had to miss
out lots of evidence we could see was there. For example, the evidence around
social networks, health and wellbeing, and poverty are extremely strong indeed,
but these could not be included within the scope of the review.

It wasn‘t all negative though – one thing that did come
through clear from the evidence was the importance of passive interaction. This
article in Discover Society about my favourite public space in the world,
City Park in my home city of Bradford, exemplifies this excellently. Freely
provided, open and accessible spaces such as schools, parks and libraries
provide areas for us to rub-up against difference, including poverty. This is
more likely to make us understand poverty a lot more and be more sympathetic to
policies to tackle poverty and integrate people into society. So, alas my main
finding was actually the usual one provided by lefty academics – don’t cut
expenditure on public services.

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.